


Isolated Storms

by princessofmind



Series: Oceanic Acculturation [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-20
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-11-10 08:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessofmind/pseuds/princessofmind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the reasons you got hired for this job was the standard of perfection you adhered to.  Nothing goes wrong, not on your watch.  It means doing most of the work yourself and many sleepless nights, but it's worth knowing that things will run off without a hitch.  You'd filled out the forms, waded through the red tape, and assured the traditional politicians that Sollux Captor was not a threat to national security.  He was under the protection of your department, and you were going to remove him and debrief him as soon as the paperwork cleared.  No security action needed to be taken against him what-so-ever.</p><p>But the next thing you know, Deuce is coming in to your office looking more than a little befuddled, saying that an elderly man and a distraught teenager were here to see you and no, they didn't have an appointment, but apparently it was very urgent and related to the Captor case and <i>what the fuck do you mean he's missing</i>?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue (Part One)

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here we go. The long awaited official sequel to Resuscitate Me, Baby. This will probably update much slower than RMB because while I know the basis of how I want things to progress, I don't know all the specifics yet, so I'll be figuring this out as we go along. I know a lot of people have been waiting for this, so I hope it lives up to your expectations. Sorry for taking so long and please enjoy!

**Your name is ROSE LALONDE and apparently, you lost him.**

The fury in your eyes is enough to clear the normally crowded hallway, and Deuce is having to sprint to keep up with your much longer strides. Even in flats, he barely comes up to your chest, so when you're rocking your favorite pair of deep purple stilettos, he doesn't even come close. His hands are worrying at his tie as he scrambles on his much shorter legs to keep up, sweat dripping down his forehead and in to his squinted eyes. You've always been told not to kill the messenger, but that didn't stop you from screaming your disbelief right in his face.

The force with which you fling open Slick's office door buries the door knob in to the dry wall behind it, and Deuce cringes as Slick practically startles out of his chair. "You're better be paying for that," he grumbles as he rights himself, raking a hand through his hair.

"Where. Is. He."

Each word is punctuated by a step forward, and you can hear Deuce trying to pull the doorknob out of the wall (with no success). Slick meets you gaze evenly, his jaw working slowly as the scent of cinnamon becomes more pungent the closer you get. "If I knew, don't you think I'd have told you?"

One of the reasons you got hired for this job was the standard of perfection you adhered to. Nothing goes wrong, not on your watch. It means doing most of the work yourself and many sleepless nights, but it's worth knowing that things will run off without a hitch. You'd filled out the forms, waded through the red tape, and assured the traditional politicians that Sollux Captor was not a threat to national security. He was under the protection of your department, and you were going to remove him and debrief him as soon as the paperwork cleared. No security action needed to be taken against him what-so-ever.

But the next thing you know, Deuce is coming in to your office looking more than a little befuddled, saying that an elderly man and a distraught teenager were here to see you and no, they didn't have an appointment, but apparently it was very urgent and related to the Captor case and _what the fuck do you mean he's missing_?

"So what am I supposed to tell them?" you say, freshly manicured nails digging in to your palms as you level your gaze with your boss. "That despite the fact that he falls under our brach, we have no clue what happened or where he's gone?"

"Look, I don't have the faintest clue what's going on," Slick spits at you, and his eyes are starting to scrunch up along with his shoulders, and you can tell he's getting angry as well. "No one notified me of a transfer, even if this was to keep you in the dark, someone should have fucking told me. This is my department, nothing goes on here that I don't know about."

"Well, apparently it does," you snark back, making him growl warningly.

"Go talk to them, find out what happens, and I'll call the Counter Intelligence Assholes and see why the hell they thought it was okay to snatch someone out from under our noses like this."

You sweep past Deuce who's still struggling with the door, the sea of busy-bodies and book keepers and secretaries eerily silent as you pass, and your office door hasn't been closed for long before you hear Slick screaming orders at them. The solid oak shuts out most of the ensuing racket, and you stand stock still for a moment, collecting your thoughts and drawing your composure around you like a cloak before addressing the two people sitting in the plush velvet chairs before your desk.

"I have to apologize," you say, and you know your cheeks are bright red; nothing embarrasses you more than failure. "This is completely unprecedented. We've never had a breach of this caliber before, but I assure you, we are going to find out what happened and why."

The man nods sagely, pushing his glasses up on his nose, but the young girl next to him doesn't look quite so mollified. Her emerald eyes glint with a righteous fury, and you notice that there's dried blood under her nose and scratches running up and down her arms, something clutched with white-knuckle intensity between her palms.

"What happened?" you ask her, and it seems like she was just waiting for the attention to fall on her, sitting forward in the chair almost desperately.

"I was visiting, like I always do after school when my club doesn't meet. Sollux was watching something on TV, some weird nerd show or something, it's not important, and I was working on a picture for the upcoming art fair. His head doctor came in, which isn't unusual, she doesn't always come at the same time, but she had a couple of other guy with her I'd never seen before. They were big, too big to be doctors, and they just pulled him right out of the bed! I was trying to ask what was going on, but another man came in, he was smaller but still scary, and he was trying to keep me in my seat. But then one of them tried to take Sollux's ring off, and that kind of woke him up, because he started yelling at them to let him go, but his depth perception is shit so he couldn't really fight very well.

Once they had the ring, one of them took the picture I'd drawn, he had it sitting on the bedside table next to him, and put it in his pocket. The biggest one just carried him out like he weighed nothing! I was freaking out, but I knew if I let them take the ring, they'd probably throw it away or something, and it's SUPER IMPORTANT to Sollux, so I kicked the small guy in the balls and ran over to the big guy who had the picture and the ring. I can always draw him another picture, but I needed to get the ring, and he still had it in his hands, so I was scratching and biting him and he was trying to pull me off and ended up elbowing me in the face but I think I ripped one of his fingernails off and that made him let go of the ring, and once I had it I ran out of there all the way home."

You're mildly stunned by the river of words that just fell from the girl's lips, and she breathes heavily for a moment because she certainly hadn't been stopping for air very much during her explanation. "You're Jade Harley, right? One of the kids who saved him." She nods. "That was a very brave thing you did. Stupid, but brave."

She seems to fluff herself a little under the praise, not seeming to mind being called stupid so long as she's called brave as well. "I don't think these people, whoever they are, realize that you or your brother saw the consort as well. But just in case they decide to come after you for resisting, I'm going to have you go talk to Droog about getting a little security at your house."

After fishing a cluster of Hello Kitty band-aids out of your desk, you send Jade and her grandfather on their way, but not before the girl practically pins you to the door with a glare filled with the animosity you're sure she showed the intruders at the hospital. "None of this is his fault, I promise. He's been through enough, so please."

The ring sits on your desk, the purple stone glittering enticingly in the harsh light of your lamp. The band is worn from what you're sure was a nervous habit of twisting it around, and it's slightly tarnished with blood, both Sollux's and now Jade's. It's heavy in your palm as you study it, and you can only imagine what it must be like to be a teenager having the only physical remainder of something everyone tells you is all in your head being torn away from you.

"I promise," you said, with no less conviction. "We'll find him."


	2. Prologue (Part Two)

**Your name is NEPETA LEIJON and you are unfortunately short.**

If you spent as much time in the water as the other people in your caste, it wouldn't matter so much how long you were. Despite barely coming up to most people's shoulders, you're a fast swimmer, and exceptionally strong. But as the aid to the consort, you spend most of your time craning your neck up at people, your bangs hanging in your eyes as you try not to appear like a little kid instead of the holder of one of the most illustrious positions offered to the lower castes.

But right now, you feel an awful lot like a little kid, neck aching in that familiar way that you've associated with standing close to Equius for years. He stoops a little, but he's just as freakishly tall and you're freakishly small, so even when seated next to each other, the height difference is downright appalling. Your back is to the wall of the throne room, and the only thing keeping you from being pressed against the uneven stone by the anxiously moving masses is Equius's bulk.

"I'm not asking you to run," he says, voice gravel-deep and barely audible over the din of the crowd. "I'm not saying you can't handle yourself. Far from. That's why I need to know that I can count on you to assist the heiress if the situation becomes untenable."

"But you're her bodyguard," you say, a bit petulantly, but something about the intensity in his eyes is making the room feel cold despite the number of bodies crowding it and makes you glad for the needle-sharp knives strapped to your thigh under the skirt of your dress. "You sound like you know something. What are you expecting to happen?"

It's kind of a stupid question, but being in the position that you're in, it's hard to believe that anyone could still be siding with the empress. In the months following Feferi's marriage, the now legitimate heiress had been attempting to take steps to shrink the difference between the living conditions of the people in the city beneath the palace and the residents of the palace itself. Small steps, like reducing the taxes and opening the trade schools for anyone who wished to learn. But the Condesce was stubborn, following behind her daughter and unraveling her work before the proverbial paint could even dry, a condescending smile on her face as she told the heiress that she just didn't understand that things worked this way for a reason. That they'd been this way for years, and it would undermine her own power if she tried to raise up the lower castes. They were ungrateful, you see, and would take advantage of her naivete and good nature. They'd eat her alive, pick the skin off her bones and ask for more.

With the force of so many people behind her and the support of Eridan and Equius at her side, Feferi hadn't let her mother intimidate her. And as soon as she realized that those tactics weren't going to work, that maintaining the status quo wouldn't settle with the empress-to-be, that the Condesce decided that things could afford to get much, much worse. Taxes on all goods purchased within the concourse skyrocketed, a curfew was instigated, and as of a week ago, all the lower castes were forced out of the palace and not allowed to return. This was no longer about the good of the people or even tradition; this was about proving a point, breaking ideals, and the Condesce wasn't going to be swayed.

That brings you to today, where the soldiers of the guard who were loyal to the heiress opened the gates to allow the people in, lead them to fill the throne room where Feferi sat in her mother's throne, her expression unreadable but her eyes hard. If you walk out from under the balcony, you can see the nobles sitting above, removed from the riffraff and clearly nervous, waiting to throw their lots in with whoever appeared to have the advantage. In stark contrast, the people standing on the floor are teaming with righteous anger, bright pink shells in their hair and tied to their wrists with string in clear support for the petite woman sitting at the front of the room.

There's tension in the air so thick it's hard to breathe, and one misspoken word or twitch in the wrong direction could shatter the tenuous peace and send the entire colony into chaos. Equius knows that you know, because he doesn't answer; just lays his big hands on your shoulders to direct your attention away from the too skinny children you can see darting between legs with soft pink ribbons streaming from the straps of their clothing. "We absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, let anything happen to the empress. I can't leave; without me, there's no one to control the guard. Despite how physical capable he is, the consort is still an outsider; they won't listen to him. But I know that you are capable of protecting her and taking her somewhere safe, that I can trust you, and that is why I ask you to remove yourself from the situation."

Part of you wants to insist that there's no way he's not letting his overprotective nature influence his decision, but even if that's part of it, that doesn't change the fact that next to him, you're the most capable person that the heiress trusts. You're her consort's assistant, the person who spends more time with him than even she does. If she didn't trust you with his life, you wouldn't be there. So if you're charged with her well-being, there's already a level of understanding between the two of you, although you've not spent much time with the heiress personally.

"I'm not happy about it," you say eventually. "But it makes sense. I don't want to assume the worst right off the bat, but if it comes down to it, don't worry about the heiress. You have my word, I'll get her out alive."

Although the worry lines between his eyebrows don't ease, his eyes soften, and he tilts your face down enough that he can kiss the top of your head before slipping into the crowd like a shadow. Another glance up at the balcony reveals a flash of teal and red and black, and you're not sure if Terezi's presence eases the worry or makes your stomach clench up more. But you don't get to linger on it, because the unhappy chatter has suddenly hushed, and without the cacophony of sound you can hear the large doors on the far end of the throne room scraping open.

The hostility spikes, every hackle in the room raised, but the Condesce doesn't seem to take note. She has her personal guard on her heels as she sweeps into the throne room, the tip of her trident screeching against the smooth marble as she drags it lazily at her side. Out of the corner of your eyes, you see Feferi's grip tighten on her own, more a symbol of her position than the circlet glinting half-hidden in her curls.

"Well, this is a nice little get-together you've set up," the taller woman says, the crowd having parted effortlessly as she proceeded to the dais, and probably would have closed back behind her to prevent escape if not for the threatening looking spear-bearing guards that keep them pressed back. "What's the occasion?"

If there's one thing you can say about Feferi, it's that she doesn't beat around the bush. She doesn't bat an eyelash as her mother comes to a stop, only a few small marble steps separating them. "Your unconditional surrender of the throne."

The Condesce surveys the much smaller girl sitting in her throne, gripping the trident so tight that her knuckles are white but her gaze is even and her face is smooth. "Why the hell would I do something like that?"

"Your actions following the officiation of my role as the eligible heiress have been inappropriate. You no longer act in the best interest of the people, even going as far as to antagonize them deliberately. These are not the actions of a leader fit for their position, so instead of waiting until you feel I am sufficiently groomed for the position, the executive decision has been made that you must either surrender the throne of your own free will, or you will be taken into custody."

There's a moment where no one moves, where your toes are starting to ache from trying to balance on them in an attempt to see over the shoulders of the people crowded around you. The Condesce picks at her fingernails, completely uninterested in what's being said to her until the very end, where her body language changes, the tip of the trident leaves the floor, and both Eridan and Equius take a step towards her.

"Oh yeah?" She bares every pointed fang in a smile as she puts a foot on the first step of the dais, leaning so close to Feferi that you can practically see the color drain from the consort's face. "You and what army?"

Feferi hasn't flinched at the close proximity, is baring her own fangs in response, but there's no hiding the confused furrow on her face. There's a flicker of movement in your peripheral, and when you turn, the door closest to you groans and scrapes against the floor as it's swung shut from the outside. The noise echoes throughout the room, but with this many people inside, it shouldn't echo. And it hits you at the same time as it hits everyone else in the room.

All the doors were closed. You're trapped.

And all hell breaks loose.

The surge of people against the door actually knocks you off your feet, but it's only seconds before you're back up, shoulder scraping painfully against the wall as you fight past the panicked people and the guards scattered throughout that you can't tell the affiliation of. But people are dropping like flies, indiscriminately, and through the deafening din you can hear Feferi's furious screech.

It's like moving through molasses, and people are getting trampled by their own fellow supporters in addition to the ones being picked off by the guards, and against the hysteria of the crowd the knives in your hands would be useless, but you have every intent of turning them on the person who grabs you by the arm so roughly you almost get lifted off the ground.

It's Terezi, and how she managed to find you in the chaos you don't know, but she's dragging you through the blood and surging bodies to the back corner, behind the dais, and you think you glimpse blood on the throne and the trident abandoned on the steps. but you don't have time to panic before you're being shoved into an opening behind one of the chunks of precious gems that decorates the back wall of the throne room.

It's a small opening, and you stumble into someone when you smack your head against the ceiling. Your eyes adjust to the dimness, and you can make out Feferi's huge eyes and the blood all over the front of her dress. "Highness, what-"

"It's not mine," she says, and there's someone else behind her gripping tight at her biceps, keeping her from surging back out into the thick of things. "Eridan-"

"You have to leave, _now_ ," Terezi hisses, her red eyes narrowed, shoulders rigid like someone would come up behind her and put a knife in her back any moment. It was incredibly likely, the longer you lingered. "Follow the passage, and when you go out, go north towards the main islands. I can't get out myself, but someone will find you. Just stay moving and _don't come back_."

Feferi snarls furiously, but when you look back at her, you can see tears in her eyes. This went wrong. This went horribly wrong. The person behind her, who you now recognize as Kanaya, tugs her back towards the exit, and the heiress has no choice but to follow her. Absently, you pass her one of your knives; you have enough to spare, and it seems to soothe her, give her something to hold on to and focus on. You meet Terezi's sightless eyes, and she nods once at you, a small motion you chose to believe is a wish of luck, before she pushes the stone back into place and the three of you are plunged into darkness, the sound of metal on metal and flesh harmonizing with screams and sobs in a song that haunts you all the way out into the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a long-ass time since I worked on this fic. I originally just wanted to take a break between Sanguine Seas and Isolated Storms, but life happened and kept happening and here we are nearly a year later with the second half of the prologue, _finally_. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who's left such nice, encouraging comments about updating and not abandoning this story. I've always intended to finish, but now it looks like I'm finally going to get around to it.
> 
> Just note, please, that it's going to be **three weeks** before the next update. I'm preparing to graduate with my bachelor's on May 10th, so it will be at least that long before you guys get something else. Again, thank you so much for the patience, and I hope you guys are excited to start seeing more from this universe again!


End file.
